A Call to Rally

By Rosa Brooks

June 26, 2014

Somewhere along the long, bumpy road of human evolution — between the emergence of Davos Man and the TEDification of everything — a new breed of journalist emerged, specially adapted to the corporatized landscape of the modern media biome. Call him Aspen Man, after his proclivity for Ideas. (Aspen Woman exists, too, but the breed skews male.) Like all journalists, Aspen Man feeds upon stories, studies and statistics, but his unique genius lies in his ability to transform the resulting partly digested mix into brain candy for well-heeled aficionados of Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman.

The Economist’s editor in chief, John Micklethwait, and its management editor, Adrian Wooldridge, are exemplary specimens of Aspen Man. In 2000, they wrote “A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization”; subsequent books included “The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea” (2003) and “God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World” (2009). Having established their credibility when it comes to Ideas both global and revolutionary, they now double down with “The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State.”

Their thesis: For 500 years, the West’s ability to reinvent the state has enabled it to lead the world. Today, however, the West is weighed down by dysfunctional governments, bloated budgets and self-­indulgent publics; it risks losing its edge to the hungrier, more autocratic Asian states. Nonetheless, if we in the West can only learn to put “more emphasis on individual rights and less on social rights” and thereby lighten “the burden,” we can still revive “the spirit of democracy” — which remains “the best guarantee of innovation and problem solving.”

“The Fourth Revolution” is a lively book, romping briskly — if selectively — through five centuries of history. It makes quick stops along the way to explain “why ideas matter” and to check out the “three and a half great revolutions” that propelled the West into its now-imperiled leadership role. Micklethwait and Wooldridge’s first revolution was the rise of the European nation-state after the Peace of Westphalia; the second was the late-18th- and 19th-­century turn toward individual rights and accountable government; the third was the creation of the modern welfare state. Each revolution improved the state’s ability to provide order and deliver vital services while still fostering innovation. But as democratic publics demanded more and more, the state promised more and more, eventually overextending itself. In Revolution 3.5, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan tried, but failed, to shrink the state.

“The Fourth Revolution” never gets too bogged down in history. Rivalries among European nation-states “threw up a system of ever-improving government,” Micklethwait and Wooldridge observe with admiration, but though this “struggle for political and economic prowess was often bloody and messy,” we skip over the blood and mess. We similarly bypass the French Revolution, which “degenerated into a blood bath,” and Communism, an “aberration.” Finally, we skate past the carnage of the 20th century, pausing only to consider that World War II “demonstrated the state’s power to deploy resources on a scale not seen before.”

“A comprehensive history of how the West established its lead in state making would be a monumental undertaking,” Micklethwait and Wooldridge acknowledge. But Aspen Man and his readers dislike heavy tomes, so they “eschew any attempt to be comprehensive.” Instead, they use a handful of exemplary thinkers to illustrate the spirit of each revolution.

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CreditMatt Dorfman

The first revolution is exemplified by Thomas Hobbes, who insisted that the state exists to provide benefits to its subjects, not the other way around. John Stuart Mill typifies the second revolution, both in his early emphasis on liberty and his later shift toward more collectivist ideas. Beatrice Webb symbolizes the third, exemplifying an idealistic commitment to using state power to remedy social inequality, but rather too willing to admire Stalin. Even the failed revolution of Thatcher and Reagan has its avatar, Milton Friedman (first met by one of the authors in a San Francisco sauna in 1981, “minimally dressed”).

This is by far the strongest section of “The Fourth Revolution,” offering a thoughtful account of how Hobbes, Mill, Webb and Friedman each struggled to answer that most fundamental of questions, What is the state for? But once these thinkers and the intellectual movements they inspired faded away, Micklethwait and Wooldridge lament, it was all downhill for the West, which stopped asking the hard questions and started looking for the easy way out.

It’s downhill for the reader, too, who is soon left adrift in a sea of anecdotes. We are told, for instance, that “it took America four years to build the Golden Gate Bridge,” but today, “a project to build a wind farm near Cape Cod has already been under scrutiny for a decade while 17 agencies studied it.” Also, America’s federal government now “has less support than George III did at the time of the American Revolution.” (Micklethwait and Wooldridge do not offer a source for this insight into George III’s poll numbers.)

We’re offered the story of Dr. Devi Shetty, “India’s most celebrated heart surgeon,” whose “team of 40-odd cardiologists perform about 600 operations a week,” lowering costs without reducing quality. We learn, too, of China’s intense focus on improving governance — but China still lags behind the West, because “you need intellectual freedom to come up with breakthrough ideas.” Mickle­thwait and Wooldridge choose to illustrate this by quoting a Chinese commentator “woefully” acknowledging that although China has kung fu and China has pandas, China “could not make a film like ‘Kung Fu Panda.’ ”

Fortunately, “ideas are crossing borders,” and it’s not too late for the West to champion the cause of freedom. This seems to mean, variously, embracing new technologies, outsourcing, getting rid of gerrymandering, reducing entitlements, cutting agricultural subsidies and getting the state out of the business of licensing hairdressers. But Micklethwait and Wooldridge never offer a coherent theory of change, agency or causation. “The West” has “repeatedly reinvented the state,” we’re told, and “it can do so again.” But just who is “the West,” and how can “it” reinvent “the state”?

It’s a shame, because along the way the authors raise important questions. “The state is in trouble,” they note. “The mystery is why so many people assume that radical change is unlikely.” They’re right to see this as a mystery: If the last 500 years have shown us anything, it is that radical change happens, repeatedly. Yet in their cheery tour of the last few centuries, they never grapple with a still more troubling truth: The evolution of the “ever-­improving” Western system of governance is inextricably bound up with mass carnage.

The modern nation-state emerged out of the religious wars that decimated Central Europe in the 17th century, while the 18th- and 19th-century reforms praised by the authors were bound up with the American and French Revolutions, the Napoleonic wars, the Franco-Prussian War and the wars of Italian unification, among others. Adjusting for population size, the death rates in these conflicts were staggering — and this is to say nothing of the wars of colonial domination that helped fuel the West’s economic expansion. The emergence of the modern welfare state is similarly bound up with the 20th century’s two catastrophic wars.

But Aspen Man survives because he knows his audience. Above all, he knows this: At the great global festival of ideas, carnage and pain are distinctly unwelcome specters.

THE FOURTH REVOLUTION

The Global Race to Reinvent the State

By John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge

Illustrated. 305 pp. The Penguin Press. $27.95.

Rosa Brooks’s next book, “By Other Means: How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything,” will be published in 2015.